> Gregory Palast, who writes for The Observer, on electric deregulation --
>
> Although Thatcher's private power market scheme
> was a poor idea that proved worse in practice, the
> International Monetary Fund and World Bank
> adopted it as a requirement of every single
> structural assistance programme worldwide. The
> World Bank's former chief economist, Joe Stiglitz,
> told me how IMF and Bank teams would fly into
> Russia and Asia, preach the wonders of privatising
> electricity markets, 'and you could see the wheels
> turning in the local officials' minds'. Here was a
> means for their corruption 'rents' to multiply a
> thousand-fold.
**************
Are we to infer from the quote that Stiglitz saw those wheels turning firsthand....and said nothing?
He wrote an essay in one of the mainstream econo. journals [I can't find my copy of it, but I think it was Brad's journal] after he left the Clintonoid White House saying how they couldn't even follow Pareto maxims and that "secrecy creates rents" in the same manner as privatization etc. It was hard to tell if he was just hand wringing as he didn't state an opinion as to whether he thought the obsession with secrecy was bogus on the face of it. Making the normative judgment of withholding normative judgment...
Ian